idiomie @archived-idiomie - Tumblr Blog

the most succinct explanation of why some lesbians use they/them or he/him pronouns is that pronouns are very much like names, in that they are culturally established signifiers we use to refer to someone else, and almost always those signifiers are gendered.

You’ll see a lot of lesbians start to go by androgynous or masculine names (or nicknames) to feel more comfortable. Sam, Pat, Chris, Jay, Moe, etc. are all really common chosen names among lesbians for that reason.

I also knew an older butch– my parents’ age– who went by Otter (& her femme partner went by Kitty) because they decided to just depart from standard names entirely– and I see younger lesbians using neo-pronouns in very similar ways for very similar reasons.

A lesbian who was raised with the name Christina and the pronouns she/her/hers deciding he’s more comfortable with the name Chris and he/him/his pronouns to reflect his complex relationship to womanhood is not a huge confusing leap, it’s pretty normal depending on what circles you’re in.

Gender is complex, and gender nonconforming lesbians, butches, and femmes have often navigated gender on their own terms to find ways of being comfortable in their bodies, relationships, and lives.

sazandorable

I just spent 2 hours debating and testing and arguing in circles and bitching about library catalogs with two colleagues and I just want to say

AO3’s website is really, really, really impressive, functional and ergonomic and cohesive. the tag system is INCREDIBLE and AMAZINGLY maintained. this is my professional librarian appraisal.

I’ve found 1 library catalog that meets my standards. even the national library of France’s catalog is shitty in comparison to ao3.

praise.

flo-nelja

It’s awesome! As a total ignorant, can I ask what AO3 does and library catalogs don’t?

sazandorable

i might actually type out a longer answer but what it really boils down to is: YOU ACTUALLY FIND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

sazandorable

ok so here’s the long unreadable (and probs uninteresting to anyone else than me) version:

- the site design and overall look. it’s easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to notice what you can click on. Makes good use of fonts and text sizes and styles to make important things stand out and be easily found at a glance, and is just overall very readable. The icons with hovertext! The tags! the amount of info that’s readable at a single glance and actually fits on the same page!

this is BASIC STUFF and it is not a given on a LOT of professional library websites i run into regularly and that drives me INSANE. (Mostly bc one of the very popular, cheap, and easy French-language library catalog softwares has a default online catalog design that sucks and which librarians generally don’t tinker with much.)

- again this seems obvious, but the filters when you’re inside a fandom/tag are SO VISIBLE and SO EXPLICIT. The filters menu makes it instantly clear what it’s for, is easy to navigate and understand and use, intelligently suggests the most popular tags first (which also immediately gives you a lot of information).

My library’s online catalog (which uses the default website set-up I mentioned above) has exactly the same thing, but stupidly executed, unreadable and incomprehensible, and somehow completely unnoticeable despite being exactly in the same place on the page. The site design makes very bad use of the space on the page and basically you just don’t even look over there because it’s so far away from where the rest of the information is and it simply never catches your eye, and even when it does, the vocabulary used is so obtuse you don’t realize what it’s for.

IT’S SO… STUPID AND EASILY FIXABLE… but apparently no public library in the french language can afford a website designer, or they’re all horrifyingly bad

- and finally: THE TAGS. One of the biggest issues we have in catalogs is that people use different words for the same thing. In order for you to find books relevant to your search, we have to apply topic keywords to them (basically: tags), but of course there are Norms so that all libraries, or at least all employees in the same library, use the same keywords. Except despite the norm that still doesn’t happen. I don’t know how it goes in the English-language world but for French language it’s all horribly complicated and surprisingly non-functional, despite how easy it seems in theory, and leads me to complain about the Bibliothèque Nationale de France about once a week at least.

Easy example that I’ve complained about today (for the 6th time this year): ADHD. The term used by the BNF, that we are supposed to use, is “Trouble de l’hyperactivité avec déficit de l’attention” (“hyperactivity disorder with attention deficit”). That’s… not only outdated but flat-out inaccurate (according to French’s current stance on it) — the term people actually use nowadays is the opposite way around, “trouble de l’attention avec ou sans hyperactivité” ( “ADD with or without hyperactivity”), commonly abbreviated to “TDA/H”. The BNF’s system does accommodate for various synonyms, but it appears unaware of this one, so if you search “TDA/H” in the keywords, you won’t find anything. You’d have to look in the title, and if none of our books have it in their title, you’ll find nothing at all, and won’t even be redirected anywhere if we strictly follow the BNF system. (WHAT IS THE POINT OF KEYWORDS THEN, one might ask.)

Tl;dr: you look for the word you and most people actually informed about a topic use, and find nothing at all because some rando has decided that’s not the word you should be using. (Unsurprisingly, this problem pops up a looot for keywords related to minorities, mental illnesses and LGBT+ topics.)

It’s like if you tried to search a site for “fluff” and didn’t find anything because the site has decided to continue using “WAFF” instead. Also, the site has decided that hurt-comfort and guro fic are the same thing, makes no distinction between levels of romance and eroticism so there’s no way to tell cute handholding from smut, and believes that the word “furry” means they get a dog.

=> The system of letting people use their words and linking them — making them synonyms — with what other people have used for the same meaning completely blows my mind. I am in awe of the fact that it works, and that it’s still happening, even though iirc tag-wranglers are unpaid volunteers. I couldn’t imagine doing something like that in just our catalog, and AO3 is massive.

The result is: not only do you find what you’re looking for, but if your search accidentally picks up other things too, you know what it’s actually about because you get it in the author’s words.

AO3′s tag system is an incredibly clever and simple solution to a very real and thorny problem that I run into almost every day.

tl;dr AO3 is just generally a perfectly functional and user-friendly site, instantly easy to use in order to tailor your search to exactly what you want (and even more so with the addition of the exclusion operator to the filters sidebar), and on a technical library-science viewpoint, it’s fascinating.

madmaudlingoes

This is taking me back to when AO3 was first born, and I was having a conversation with someone (@icarusancalion, I think?) about how I didn’t think the tagging system was ever really gonna be useful.

I knew the kind of top-down tagging system that libraries use was often useless for the same reasons you’re describing here: academics like the idea of a priori systems and exclusive classification schemata, but AO3 tagging is useful precisely because tags can be messy and overlapping rather than strict hierarchies. You’ll never get all fandoms everywhere to agree on a common tag family, I said c. 2008. It’ll be outdated before it’s even implemented. But relying entirely on user-generated tags will be a logistical nightmare, past!Maud also argued, because there would be no way to manage synonyms and near-synonyms and typos that would rapidly bloat the system to uselessness.

Well, 2008!me was right about top-down schemata but wrong about user-submitted tags, thanks almost entirely to the work of the tag wranglers: human curators who take the time to link and nest related tags as they come up, without relying on a pristine (and utterly dysfunctional) a priori system to do so.

Would real-world academic libraries benefit from tag wranglers? Absofuckinglutely, but I really don’t think most of them would ever implement them for the same reason past!me was skeptical of them. Maybe if they were shown how well it works on AO3 (where the wranglers are all volunteers!) they might be persuaded to hire some workstudies or under-employed PhDs to wrangle for them. And then the world would be a better place.

just-chilln

killerchickadee

You kiddos have no idea how groundbreaking this was. Like there’s a reason THE lesbian website for a billion years was called After Ellen. She changed everything.

pomme-poire-peche

I used to tell young people that I came out in the same year Ellen did, and then they stopped understanding that reference. you guys have to understand that we had SHIT ALL until she came out on her show. We had little bits and bobs here and there but nothing equalled the star of a very popular prime-time TV sitcom coming out both on her show and in real life. It’s honestly a bit embarrassing but it did fundamentally change the way that people talked about queer people, certainly in North America. There were still tons of people who hated us but there were a lot fewer people who had just never heard of us. Including a lot fewer queer people who had never hard of other queer people.

jumpingjacktrash

also re documentaries

bbc makes the best documentaries but they really need to hire someone from the american midwest who they consult before they write anything about weather because like

you guys

golf ball hail is not that big a deal

and sun dogs are super normal

and basically everything that happens in the sky at the center of a large continent is kind of extra? and somewhat dangerous? and i’m sure it looks really bizarre to you because you live on Tepid Island where it doesn’t get hot or cold but i promise you these things happen all the time around here

gildunofficial

Yeah but consider this: they are making the documentaries primarily targeted towards us people who also live on tepid island so of course they’re gonna present it that way

osberend

But consider again: They could get extra drama for the Tepid Islanders by throwing in some context that makes the point that no, this isn’t a freakish event — actually, it’s fairly common, and the locals consider it routine and normal.

jumpingjacktrash

Classy English Narrator: “when the temperature reaches negative forty – the point where the celsius and farenheit scales cross – you see some really strange effects! imagine…. boiling water… turning instantly to snow!

camera: *pans across a school parking lot in which spherically bundled children are throwing clouds of steam in the air from dixie cups and laughing at the resulting snowfall*

american accent emerging from a red nose and pair of squinty eyes with frost-crusted eyelashes, beside the electric kettle and stack of cups: “yeah it’s a fun opportunity for a science lesson, we do this every year.”

Classy English Narrator: “why are the inhabitants of the american midwest still alive? we just may never know.”

hammytotherescue

She’s cute, but needs to be restarted often. :/

thesteadfastsbridge-deactivated

What a cinnamon roll.

strangelystrangestranger

My favorite part of reading Les Mis is when Victor Hugo says “we must be brief” and then plunges into a 40 page description of the Battle of Waterloo

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

this is the most succinct summary of Victor Hugo’s writing style i will ever encounter

princesscarriefisher

💘💘💘

therealraewest

A guy just came to my house while I was home alone to ask if I was single why are men like this

therealraewest

Okay y'know what I’m gonna soapbox for a hot minute

When I was in high school, a man who I’d thought was the parent of a school friend followed me out to the grocery store parking lot greenhouse where I worked. It was dark, and late, and it was me, alone, in a chain link enclosure with one exit and a register full of cash. He called me up to the fence and asked if I wanted to get dinner, or go dancing. I was scared and shaking and told him no several times, and he only left when I falsely said I had a boyfriend. I was very aware that if he were to come over the fence, or just wait at the exit until I eventually had to leave, I could do nothing about it.

When my hair was very short, a hairdresser sent me to the barber’s side of the store so they could get the back of my head with clippers. The barber followed me out to my car to ask me out afterwards. I was very aware that we were the only people in the parking lot when it happened, and that the lot itself was tucked behind the building with no clear visibility to the road.

Today, a man I’ve met once made it very clear he knows where I live, and used that knowledge to express a romantic interest. If he ever decides that he’s unhappy with how I responded, he knows where I live. He knows what my car looks like. It is impossibly easy for him to determine when I’m home alone, and now I have to live with that knowledge.

Every woman I know has at least one story like this. My roommate had to be escorted to her car every night when she was a waitress, in case some man was waiting for her or a coworker’s shift to end.

If the person you want to ask out cannot physically run away from you when you are asking, YOU CANNOT ASK THEM OUT. You cannot ask someone out if they are at work. You cannot ask someone out if you’ve followed them to a remote/unoccupied/enclosed area. You cannot GO TO SOMEONE’S HOME UNINVITED to ask them out. You are not being romantic. You are not “taking initiative”. You are terrifying the person you want to woo. If they say yes, it is not because they want to, it is because they are terrified of what might happen if they say no.

I’m so tired of being terrified by men who think they’re being romantic.

blackjackgabbiani

“Every woman” you say. Do you personally know every woman in the world? Don’t presume to speak for others, and don’t make this a gendered issue either.

therealraewest

Actually every woman in the world is in one big group chat and they’re all telling you to fuck off

the-real-seebs

The claim wasn’t “every woman in the world”, it was “every woman I know”. And while the issue may not be innately gendered, I don’t think I know a single cis male who has ever had the problem, or at least, who identified it as possibly a problem, but most of the women I know, and at least a couple of the trans men, have had this exact problem.

So there does seem to be some kind of pattern here.

kawuli

Using centripetal force to prevent a $4 billion healthcare cost

1. Doctor finds anecdotal evidence that people are passing kidney stones after riding on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney World

2. Doctor makes 3-D model of kidney, complete with stones and urine (his own), takes it on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 60 times

3. “The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: ‘Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.’”

4. “Some rides are going to be more advantageous for some patients than other rides. So I wouldn’t say that the only ride that helps you pass stones is Big Thunder Mountain. That’s grossly inaccurate.”

5. “His advice for now: If you know you have a stone that’s smaller than five millimeters, riding a series of roller coasters could help you pass that stone before it gets to an obstructive size and either causes debilitating colic or requires a $10,000 procedure to try and break it up. And even once a stone is broken up using shock waves, tiny fragments and “dust” remain that need to be passed. The coaster could help with that, too.”

SCIENCE: IT WORKS

kawuli

Update:

“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters,” Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.”Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn’t allow it to pass.“The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements,” he said.

MSU Today

kawuli

I just love this because it’s HILARIOUS and yet also a perfect archetypal example of The Scientific Method:

1. Hypothesis

2. Experiment

3. Results

4. Discussion

5. Conclusions

6. GOTO 1 (the scientific method is iterative, don’t forget that part)

kristoffbjorgman

was this like… done in cooperation with disney management or did some random scientist go through bag check with a 3d printed kidney and a bottle of piss and start looking for big thunder mountain fastpasses

the-pie-initiative

He asked first!

Of course, the researchers had to get permission from Disney World before bringing the model kidney onto the rides. “It was a little bit of luck,” Wartinger recalls. “We went to guest services, and we didn’t want them to wonder what was going on—two adult men riding the same ride again and again, carrying a backpack. We told them what our intent was, and it turned out that the manager that day was a guy who recently had a kidney stone. He called the ride manager and said, do whatever you can to help these guys, they’re trying to help people with kidney stones.”

the-real-seebs

that is beautiful.

yeettherich

Community response to Xenophobia in London

your-friendly-neighborhood-ace

Sorry i dont make the rules

catchymemes

Unmute

fieldbears

Unmute

makingqueerhistory

There has been a disturbing trend I have noticed in discussions of queer history and I think it is important to address.

There are a lot of people saying things like “people who talk about queer history and don’t know about (fill in the blank) are ridiculous”. And that in itself is not a problem but the blank is ALWAYS filled with something from American/British history.

I have discussed this before but I want to say it again, prioritizing American/British history is a horrible trend that is aggressively prevalent within the queer community. And posts and discussions that place those narratives as Need to Know yet never place importance on stories from other countries are incredibly damaging and something people need to keep an eye on in the projects and work they follow and in themselves.

We can do better than this, we have to do better than this.

GUESS WHO’S A PRESCHOOL TEACHER NOW

#its me #i start monday #i thought i was applying to be a daycare sitter whoops #personal

freedom-of-fanfic

medleymisty

replied to your post

“I find the reading comprehension skills of some of your anons and…”

Also there’s the cost of college. I went to rural working class public schools where everything was very basic, and college is increasingly out of people’s reach. I ended up dropping out of a four year school and getting a two year degree, and people would say that’s a failure and shame me for it, but also the lack of student debt meant that we could buy a house in our 20s. But still, there is a lot that I wasn’t exposed to, and I know that I am very ignorant.

yeah - the financial burden of college has gotten absurd, particularly when considering wage stagnation, so even people who want to continue their education end up having to make choices like this one.

also just to be clear: lacking a formal education degree/learning informally is different from being willfully ignorant. one can have the best education money can buy, get all the degrees, and still choose ignorance on unrelated subjects or closemindedness. otoh, one can also lack a formal degree and still choose to keep learning, read up with current events, or practice open-mindedness.

there’s also a big difference between being uneducated or under-educated and being anti-intellectual.

anti-intellectualism is actively opposing increasing knowledge. anti-intellectuals oppose things like expanding the horizons of human knowledge, engaging in intellectually stimulating information-sharing, and increasing general accessibility of information. and it’s popular among authoritarian thinkers because encouraging people to learn new things and consider subjects from multiple viewpoints makes them harder to trick, harder to control, and discourages mindless devotion to simplistic causes.

in comparison: uneducated people might be easier to fool because they lack access to better information. but a lack of education says nothing about one’s attitude towards learning (and (for now at least), internet access can go a long way towards gaining what formal education failed to give.)

dr-dendritic-trees

Reblogging this as a good general point.

poztatt

Additional points.

Knowledge does not lead to inevitable choices. Working and living in the field of HIV/AIDS and the intersection of various other comorbidities? I can tell you people can be “educated” as all get out and still make decisions that from the outside can be judged up, down, left, right, any which way. Knowledge and education do not equate with better choices. More, yes. But not better.

Education can (but should not be read as inevitably does) lead to patterned thinking that can sometimes lead to massive swathes of unintentional ignorance. “But I’ve never read a study about that or that shows that” is something I’ve run into when talking about something I’ve personally lived.

And because they’re conditioned to think:

A doctor quotes a case. A patient quotes a personal experience.

There sometimes is a dynamic where their education has to be almost forcibly stunned long enough for the person to re-emerge and engage with the world they’re in.

I have a highschool education. I never went past that. I do guest lectures in universities. Nothing says “weird” to that mindset like doing a guest teaching lecture for 3rd year psych students. Seriously. I’m still kinda giggling.

I’m published in science fiction, fantasy, non-fiction and hopefully in a lil bit I’ll also be in a textbook. (and no, not as a syndrome! :P)

Learning is not education. You can learn without one. ADMITTEDLY I think getting one if at all possible is a great choice. But for those thinking, like I still do from time to time… oh shit, I’ll never be good enough, smart enough, whatever enough because I didn’t do the Thing?

It’s not the only path. Not going to school is not the same as being dumb. You don’t have to put down learning because you’re not in school. Keep going, keep reading and talking and learning and asking questions. And those people who stand there at some point in your life and talk down at you?

Remember the number one truth of, say, the science fields. Everyone thinks they’re an imposter.

olderthannetfic

Yes, You Should be Afraid

The sky isn’t falling, Tumblr isn’t deleting all the dirty fan art on purpose, and fandom isn’t going to leave Tumblr tomorrow.

However…

Once a site starts using bots to delete content willy-nilly, it has a serious problem and is not a safe home for fandom. In this case, the aim was to get rid of child pornography. (Actual child pornography.) The problem was already so out of control that they hit a bunch of innocent blogs by accident.

If this happened once, it’s going to happen again. It’s going to keep happening until Tumblr’s limited staff is so overstretched that they stop even a vague pretense of caring about false positives and accidental deletions of other content.

I’ve already seen several posts going around telling people to “calm down” and assuring us that Tumblr isn’t out to get us. Tumblr is not out to get us, but they’re not out to help fandom either, and you should definitely not calm down.

Make your other accounts now.

Have somewhere to go when Tumblr finishes imploding.

harpergetsfannish

Two bits of advice:

-back up your stuff. make copies of your important text posts. save your media elsewhere. tumblr has a built in backup tool. use that.

-let your friends know where else to find you. fannish exodus works best when we end up the same places. (may I suggest dreamwidth?)

etherviolet

Last I heard dreamwidth was not a great option because it’s servers are in Russia. Many of us think of the internet as something that lives “in the cloud, up there somewhere” but much of it’s infrastructure is hosted in rooms full of servers around the world. The server’s physical locations are subject to the laws of those areas/countries.

olderthannetfic

That’s Livejournal, dude, not Dreamwidth.

Dreamwidth is a similar-looking site that started off as a code fork of LJ. It is run by a tiny team in the US and is explicitly fandom-friendly. They’ve already been attacked by having people tattle to paypal and get their paypal suspended. They had to find a (more expensive for them) credit card processor that wouldn’t hold them hostage, demanding they change their content policies.

From the ‘open expression’ part of their about us page:

“We believe in sustainability, not profiteering. We want to grow our business slowly and steadily, in a way that can support the community instead of exploiting it. We don’t own you or your content – we hope that you’ll empower us to be your hands and trust us to build a community that can last.

We will remain third-party-advertising-free. We believe it’s possible to run a sustainable hosted service without resorting to third-party advertising or third-party sponsorship – and we’re committed to showing you what we’re taking in, what we’re spending, and where the money’s going.”

The problem with Dreamwidth is that it looks old-fashioned and doesn’t have all of the features fandom likes: The image hosting is minimal, and there’s no reblogging.

What it’s great for is text discussion with threaded comments (for which we use reblogs here, but for which reblogs frankly suck).

The people and policies behind the site are all great.

calime33

As someone who’s moved with fandom from BBBoards and Yahoo groups to Livejournal to Dreamwidth and AO3 and Tumblr and most recently to Pillowfort - it seems to be par of the course for sites that are NOT fandom-made to sooner or later become unfriendly or less usable to fandom. Dreamwidth may be quiet, but it’s made by fen, and I will keep supporting it with my money and looking in now and then to see old friends. I will keep supporting AO3 that was born out of that same needs for the fandom to own the servers. I would suggest people not forget fanlore.org - it’s your fandom lore wiki, and you can create an user page for yourself to direct anyone how to find you in case one of your main non-fandom-maintained fannish-community sites goes boom (a lot of us did when LJ purges and Delicious blowout and other stuff like that happened, here’s mine with my fannish contact info - https://fanlore.org/wiki/User:Calime ). We will no doubt be ousted from many a wide world web pasture in the future like we were in the past, but fandom network is resilient and stays around. Also, please, don’t forget your history and keep supporting the sites and organisations that fandom has made for the fandom, like AO3 and OTW, or the ones that like-minded people have created to be fandom-friendly, like Dreamwidth.

blackqueerblog

People helping people. That’s all this world should be about cuz all we got is each other. Love seeing this kindness from big companies. Needs to happen more often in corporate America.